03 October, 2016

Happy Monday friends, here we are in the month of October already! It's my favorite months you guys, I love love love it! Because Halloween is this month, I decided to dedicate October Monday Poems to all spooky, scary and dark poems that I like!

Today we are reading:

THE VAMPIRE BY MADISON JULIUS CAWEIN

Let's get to know Madison Julius Cawein:

Madison Julius Cawein (March 23, 1865 – December 8, 1914) was an American poet. He was the fifth child of William and Christiana Cawein. His father
made patent medicines from herbs, so as a child, Cawein became
acquainted with and developed a love for local nature. His writing presented Kentucky scenes in a language similar to John Keats, so people started refering to him as 'Keats of Kentucky'. In 1913, a year before his death, Cawein published a poem called "Waste Land" in a Chicago magazine which included Erza Pound as an editor. Scholars have identified this poem as an inspiration to T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, published in 1922 and considered the birth of modernism in poetry.

The Vampire

A lily in a twilight place?
A moonflow’r in the lonely night?—
Strange beauty of a woman’s face
Of wildflow’r-white!
The rain that hangs a star’s green ray
Slim on a leaf-point’s restlessness,
Is not so glimmering green and gray
As was her dress.
I drew her dark hair from her eyes,
And in their deeps beheld a while
Such shadowy moonlight as the skies
Of Hell may smile.
She held her mouth up redly wan,
And burning cold,—I bent and kissed
Such rosy snow as some wild dawn
Makes of a mist.
God shall not take from me that hour,
When round my neck her white arms clung!
When ‘neath my lips, like some fierce flower,
Her white throat swung!
Or words she murmured while she leaned!
Witch-words, she holds me softly by,—
The spell that binds me to a fiend
Until I die.

When I was growing up we didn't celebrate Halloween in Lithuania, so this holiday means a lot to me because as I was growing up I could only imagine how cool it must be to dress up in scary costumes and go to ask for candy, simply because I always was dramatic child and dressing up was really fun for me! Later of course we started having celebration for Halloween as well and every year in October I start to read scary poetry, or stories to just become more exited about the holiday. If you are new to this blog, I have to tell you I love vampires and the whole mythology of them fascinates me. I remember when I discovered this poem in one of the forums about vampires, I completely lost my mind, because it was so raw to me so real. To have a person describe how the vampire looked and how it slowly devoured the human soul and killed it. Simply amazing! I always imagines a vampire woman to be so elegant so mesmerizing that you couldn't even take your eyes off of her and just let her kill you without even thinking twice. This poem helps me to imagine that other people also have put a though into how would they react if they ever met a true vampire.